Regency Christmas Vows. Anne Herries

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      For the first eighteen years of her life NICOLA CORNICK lived in Yorkshire, within a stone’s throw of the moors that had inspired the Brontë sisters to write Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. One of her grandfathers was a poet and her family contained teachers and avid readers who filled the house with books. With such a background it was impossible for Nicola not to become a bookworm.

      Nicola met her future husband while she was at university, although it took her four years to realise that he was special and more than just a friend. Her husband, being so much more perceptive, had worked this out much sooner, but eventually an understanding was reached.

      This lack of perception also meant that Nicola did not realise for years that she was meant to be a writer. She wrote bits and pieces of novels in her spare time, but never finished any of them. Eventually, she sent in the first three chapters of a Regency romance to Mills & Boon and, although they were rejected, she found she had become so addicted to writing that she could not stop. Happily, her third attempt was accepted and she has never looked back.

      Nicola loves to hear from her readers and can be contacted by e-mail or via her website, www.nicolacornick.co.uk.

       Chapter One

      Mr Julius Churchward, representative of the famously discreet London lawyers of the same name, had a variety of facial expressions he could draw upon, depending on the nature of the news he was imparting to his aristocratic clients. There was sympathetic but grave, used when breaking the news that an inheritance was substantially smaller than expected; there was sympathetic but rueful, for unsatisfactory offspring and breach of promise; finally, there was an all-purpose dolefulness, for when the precise nature of the problem was in doubt. It was this third alternative that he adopted now, as he stood on the doorstep of Lady Amelia Fenton’s trim house in Bath, for if the truth were told, he knew nothing of the contents of the letter he was about to deliver.

      Mr Churchward had travelled from London the previous day, stopped overnight at the Star and Garter in Newbury and resumed his journey at first light. To undertake such a journey in winter, with Christmas pressing close upon them, argued some urgency. The morning sun was warming the creamy Bath stone of Brock Street but the winter air was chill. Mr Churchward shivered inside his overcoat and hoped that Miss Sarah Sheridan, Lady Amelia’s companion, was not still at breakfast.

      A neat maid СКАЧАТЬ